This story is part of “Taken by Taxes,” a joint project of Injustice Watch and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity.
Key takeaways
- A Cook County Treasurer’s Office probe into prominent tax investor Greg Bingham revealed what the office’s researchers describe in memos to law enforcement as a “sophisticated conspiracy to commit millions of dollars of fraud.”
- Former clients and business partners have also accused Bingham and his companies of fraud and other deceptive business practices since the late 1990s, according to an Injustice Watch review of dozens of lawsuits, consumer fraud complaints, and other government documents.
- Experts said the claims against Bingham highlight the lack of oversight of the tax foreclosure system.
- Bingham has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. A spokesperson for Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said her office’s inquiry into Bingham is ongoing.
The storefront sandwiched between an old piano store and a dental clinic in suburban Northlake bears no sign of what goes on inside. Public records, however, reveal that from its confines, real estate investor Greg Bingham oversees an empire of foreclosed homes.
Since the 1990s, records show Bingham has been active in Cook County’s annual tax sales — public auctions where in-the-know investors can purchase a homeowner’s delinquent property tax debt.
By state law, most homeowners have 30 months after the auction to pay back what they owe. If they don’t, the investors, also known as tax buyers, can take over their properties, sell them, and pocket the profit. Bingham has taken ownership of and sold more than 350 properties in Cook County this way, mostly in majority-Black neighborhoods, for a total of more than $25 million, records show.
He also has raked in nearly $8 million in public funds by taking advantage of an obscure legal loophole more than any other tax buyer, according to a 2022 report published by the county’s treasurer’s office, which runs the county’s annual tax auction.
On his unconventional road to riches, however, an investigation by Injustice Watch in partnership with the Investigative Project on Race and Equity found that Bingham not only exploited the law — he may have broken it.
Researchers in the treasurer’s office uncovered what they told law enforcement appeared to be a “widespread and sophisticated conspiracy to commit millions of dollars in fraud” run by Bingham from at least 2018 to 2024.
According to the researchers, Bingham oversaw the filing of fraudulent records — including false affidavits, bogus bankruptcy petitions, and recycled photographs — in state and federal courts in order to use the tax loophole to claw back more than $3 million. To pay Bingham, the county had to dip into the funds that had been earmarked for municipal budgets, schools, parks, libraries, and other public services.
To confirm the researchers’ findings, Injustice Watch analyzed thousands of pages of court records, hundreds of property records, and dozens of emails and other internal documents obtained through public records requests.
Leading the secret inquiry into Bingham was Todd Lighty, then the deputy director of research at the treasurer’s office and a former investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Lighty and his team pored over thousands of documents, and shared their findings directly with the FBI and Cook County prosecutors, according to emails.
“I know this can all be confusing, so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call me,” Lighty wrote in a January 2023 email to an FBI agent, attaching a detailed memo breaking down Bingham’s alleged scheme. Lighty wrote to another FBI agent a few more times until June 2023, according to the emails.
Ten months later, Lighty emailed an updated memo outlining Bingham’s alleged scheme — “with indications of fraud involving tax appeals in the Assessor’s office, and tax fraud involving real estate closings” — to David Williams, head of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s fraud and financial crimes unit.
Attached to the email was a PowerPoint presentation filled with what Lighty referred to as “bogus pictures and doctored dates that Mr. Bingham submitted to Cook County judges in order to illegally obtain government refunds in more than 100 cases.”
Despite Lighty’s efforts, neither federal nor Cook County prosecutors have charged Bingham with a crime.
In response to detailed questions from Injustice Watch, a lawyer for Bingham wrote, “He is a respected businessman who has been in (the) real estate and tax industry for many years. He denies the many false, misleading, and/or factually incorrect allegations.”
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment about Bingham, as did Lighty and Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.
A spokesperson for Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said via email in January that her office’s inquiry into Bingham “is still a pending investigation.”
The refunds identified by Lighty and his team are the source of only the latest claims of fraud against Bingham that reached law enforcement.
In the early 2000s, records show Bingham and a business partner, Brian Urbanowski, began marketing homes that they owned as “Chicagoland’s finest rehab properties,” with the opportunity for buyers to “make thousands” by fixing up the property, selling it, and splitting the profits. By the time the duo split ways in 2006, however, more than two dozen buyers had filed consumer fraud complaints against them with the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, records show.
In the complaints, obtained by Injustice Watch through a public records request, several buyers said they depleted their savings and went into debt fixing the homes, only to be locked out and evicted from the properties before they could sell them. “I find myself in ruins and (on) the verge of bankruptcy,” one person wrote in their complaint, which was originally filed in Spanish. “This is fraud, a robbery,” the complaint says.
Bingham, Urbanowski, and their attorneys responded to the complaints by citing contracts the buyers had signed that required them to pay $5,000 as a down payment for the property, with the rest of the money — in some cases more than $100,000 — due in three months. Records included in the complaints show it was on the buyer to rehab the property and find a new third-party buyer. If they failed, Bingham and Urbanowski could kick them out without compensating them for any work or money they had put in, according to the contracts.
In a November 2006 memo to Illinois’ consumer fraud bureau chief, an assistant state attorney general concluded Bingham and Urbanowski sold “homes on contract to unsophisticated rehabbers,” but did not say whether they broke any laws. State prosecutors ultimately did not charge either of them.
A spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office declined to answer questions. Urbanowski also declined to comment.
Bingham and his companies have also been accused of fraud and breach of contract in more than a dozen lawsuits filed by his clients and former business partners, court records show.
One of the most recent examples involves his college fraternity brother and longtime business partner, Norman Shanker. Shanker alleged in court filings that Bingham defrauded him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of a property they co-owned. Shanker alleged Bingham took the money by filing a phony mechanic’s lien against the property through one of his companies for supposed unpaid work on the building.
Property records show Bingham’s company Lendco Inc. placed a $460,000 lien on the building two days before it was sold for $522,000. “Lendco Inc. performed no meaningful work on the property to justify the mechanic’s lien,” Shanker said in court filings.
In those same filings, Shanker alleged that Bingham used phony liens in other real estate transactions in order to “conceal his assets and income from his wife and tax authorities.”
Bingham denied wrongdoing and filed his own claims against Shanker. The case was later settled, but the terms were not disclosed. Shanker declined to comment.
Injustice Watch identified dozens more liens filed by one of Bingham’s companies against another one of his companies. According to property records, the liens were often filed just days before the buildings were sold to a third party, and often for the exact sale price — or even more. Together, the more than 50 liens diverted more than $3 million from the sale proceeds.
For example, a Bingham-controlled company named Cortezz LLC sold a rehabbed single-family home in the south suburbs for $360,000 in January. A week before the sale, however, another Bingham company named Donn Pedro LLC had placed a mechanic’s lien on the property, seeking $390,000 for nearly three years of “property management,” county records show.
In court filings, Bingham has denied all of the allegations against him.
Andrew Kahrl, a history professor at the University of Virginia and author of “The Black Tax,” a 2024 book on the tax lien industry and its impact on Chicago’s Black communities, said the claims against Bingham highlight the lack of oversight of the tax foreclosure system.
“The courts don’t do any scrutiny at all, like the judges are just pushing papers along,” Kahrl said.
At the same time, he called Bingham’s alleged schemes “bizarre.”
The current laws around tax sales “allow for gross profiteering without the need to engage in — quote — fraud,” he said.
“It’s just crazy, because you can make so much money as is.”
Refund loop-de-loop
Illinois’ tax sale laws are the most abusive to homeowners in the country, experts say.
Unlike mortgage foreclosure sales, where homeowners get to keep proceeds from the sale of their home that exceed what they owed, Illinois homeowners in tax foreclosure walk away with nothing. Instead, investors who take their homes get to keep all the proceeds once they sell it, even if the sale price exceeds the original tax debt.
Since 2019, investors have taken more than 1,000 owner-occupied Cook County homes collectively with an estimated market value of more than $100 million, Injustice Watch and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity reported last year.
But just as Illinois’ tax sale laws hurt homeowners the most, they also provide ample protection for investors, experts say. Baked into the state’s tax sale laws are what are known as sale-in-error provisions, which allow investors to undo a tax sale and get a refund.
The refunds, which must be approved by a judge, were intended to rectify mistakes made by county officials, like accidentally selling government-owned or otherwise tax-exempt properties. In those cases, investors can also receive interest payments on top of their refunds as a form of compensation.
However, a groundbreaking report by Lighty published by the treasurer’s office in 2022 showed how investors had turned the refunds into another revenue stream.
Small errors in the description of properties up for grabs at tax auctions — such as listing a property as a one-story home with no attic when it did in fact have one — were turned into profits by investors who knew how to exploit the law.
No one made out better than Bingham. Between 2015 and 2022, his companies got more than $95 million in refunds, including $7.8 million in interest, according to Lighty’s report.
The report details how Bingham allegedly tried to game the system, including in one case in which he dispatched environmental inspectors to a Calumet City strip mall. The inspectors were on the hunt for asbestos and lead — hazardous substances that would have allowed Bingham to seek a refund worth $1.4 million. The problem, however, was that Bingham allegedly told the inspectors to pose as city officials — armed with a fake, typo-ridden notice printed on the city’s letterhead — in order to gain access to the mall, prompting a store manager to call 911, according to a police report cited by Lighty and obtained by Injustice Watch.
In the course of his research, Lighty discovered more examples that he believed tied Bingham to suspected criminal activity, according to dozens of internal emails obtained by Injustice Watch. Only this time, he shared his findings directly with law enforcement.
For example, in his memos to the FBI and county prosecutors, Lighty alleged that Bingham, through one of his employees, exploited a sale-in-error provision that grants investors a refund with interest for properties tied up in bankruptcy proceedings — even if the bankruptcy petition was filed after the tax sale had already taken place.
On at least three occasions, according to public records reviewed by Injustice Watch, one of Bingham’s companies paid off a building’s delinquent taxes at auction, only for Bingham to later purchase the property outright through a shell company. The shell company would then declare bankruptcy, and Bingham’s other company that had paid the taxes would go on to request a refund.
The complicated maneuver allowed Bingham to acquire nearly $235,000 in refunds, including nearly $47,000 in interest, according to Lighty.
What’s more, Lighty and his team identified 145 refunds filed by Bingham and granted by Cook County judges from 2018 to 2024 that appeared to contain duplicate or doctored photographs.
Those refunds totaled more than $3 million, according to public records. They were claimed under a sale-in-error provision of state law that allows investors to get their money back if the property they won at auction becomes “substantially destroyed” before they fully take it over.
By law, these types of refunds do not come with interest, which Lighty said makes them an option of “last resort” for investors who want to at least get most of their money back.
To prove he qualified for these refunds, Bingham’s companies, through his attorneys, filed photos purporting to show how the interior and exterior of buildings in question had been destroyed after the tax sale, according to court records. However, court records show the filings in these cases used recycled photos from other properties, including apparently “doctored dates to ensure the photos fit the timeframe for each court case,” Lighty told law enforcement.
In one example, court records show Bingham obtained a $170,000 refund in January 2024 for a building in Chicago Heights after filing photos depicting a mold-infested wall, a hallway with paint chips on the floor, and a rundown bathroom with a hole in the ceiling and a distinctive pink bathtub, sink, and window frame.
However, court records show Bingham had already submitted these photos to obtain refunds for four different properties as early as 2018. The photos bore different dates each time. Yet Bingham submitted a sworn affidavit claiming he took the photos at the Chicago Heights building in November 2023.
Unlike the Chicago Heights case, most of the potentially fraudulent refunds identified by Lighty and his team only featured one or two repeat photos, according to two slide-show presentations shared with law enforcement and obtained by Injustice Watch through a public records request. The presentations depicted repeat photos Lighty’s team found in two or more of Bingham’s refund requests and their respective case numbers.
Injustice Watch verified Lighty’s findings and also analyzed court records for each of the cases to identify which attorneys represented Bingham in these cases and which judges failed to catch the repeat images.
The analysis showed that six attorneys filed the refunds on behalf of Bingham’s companies between 2018 and 2024, with two attorneys, Douglas Miller and Heather Ottenfeld, filing about 80% of them.
Court records show Miller has represented Bingham’s companies since at least 2018, while Ottenfeld runs a private practice representing tax lien investors.
The attorneys have not been accused of wrongdoing.
Miller did not respond to questions about Injustice Watch’s findings.
“As a general matter, attorneys often must rely on representations made by clients and third-party vendors unless there is a clear and articulable reason to believe those representations are false,” an attorney for Ottenfeld wrote in an email. “Your email does not identify any evidence that Ms. Ottenfeld had such knowledge at the time of filing.”
Injustice Watch also identified nearly a dozen current and former Cook County judges who approved Bingham’s refunds. Judges were rarely assigned two or more refund cases that featured the same photos, but when they were, they approved the refunds anyway.
For example, about a month after signing off on a refund for the Chicago Heights property, records show Judge Kathleen Marie Burke approved another Bingham refund for more than $14,000 that also included what appeared to be a cropped and rotated version of the photo of the pink window frame.
Attempts to reach Burke, who retired in August, were unsuccessful.
In another example, records show Judge Maureen O. Hannon approved refunds within a week for two different properties that featured photos of the same cluttered living room.
Hannon declined to answer questions about Bingham’s cases.
However, in a statement provided by a spokesperson, she noted that Bingham’s lawyers — whom she referred to as “officers of the court” — had filed the refund petitions containing the recycled photos and that county prosecutors had also been notified of the proceedings.
“No objections were raised during the hearings, no subsequent filings were made, and no appeal was filed within 30 days by any party regarding these matters,” her statement said.
‘Don’t try to be a lawyer’
Allegations of fraud and deception have followed Bingham for decades and were repeatedly raised with law enforcement agencies.
Reports submitted to financial regulators obtained by Injustice Watch show Bingham, while working for a brokerage firm in the mid-1990s, was accused by a customer of misrepresenting and omitting facts. The customer demanded $16,000 in reimbursement, and Bingham’s employer eventually settled.
Then, in 1999, an internal review found Bingham “may have sold insurance products not offered or approved” by his then-employer. Bingham resigned after the company asked to review all of his sales, according to the reports.
By then, property records show Bingham had already acquired a handful of homes on Chicago’s South and West Sides through tax foreclosure.
Around this time is when, court records show, Bingham went into the real estate rehab business with Urbanowski through a joint venture called URB Inc.
Several of the two-dozen people who filed consumer fraud complaints against the duo said in complaints that the prices at which they agreed to buy the homes were inflated by tens of thousands of dollars. In one complaint, a client alleged that after failing to find a buyer for a rehabbed property, a mortgage broker told him “the only way to get rid of this property” — which the broker had appraised for $105,000 — was for the client’s wife to purchase it from Bingham. But when the couple put the home on the market, another appraisal for the property “came in only for $50,000,” according to the complaint.
“Never was able to sell property lost it to foreclosure lost everything,” the handwritten complaint reads.
The mortgage broker in that case, Rodrigo Navascues, was one of a few URB recommended to its clients. Navascues was later indicted on 100 counts of fraud, forgery, and other financial crimes, records show.
According to news reports at the time, the charges were related to a mortgage fraud scheme involving homes initially acquired by URB. Navascues later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years’ probation, court records show. Terry Faulkner, a co-defendant who had allegedly purchased the properties from URB was convicted of theft of over $500,000 and sentenced to four years in prison, court records show.
As part of the investigation into Navascues and Faulkner, police raided URB’s offices and Bingham’s personal residence in River Forest in November 2006, seizing computers and a slew of documents, law enforcement records show. Neither Bingham nor Urbanowski were ever charged with a crime.
Although Bingham had stopped doing business with Urbanowski by the time of the raid, in 2008 Bingham began selling tax-foreclosed homes as fixer-uppers under a new company, Start Rehab.
The fraud allegations continued to roll in, records show.
In one case, a seasoned contractor and Baptist pastor named Maurice Johnson sued Bingham after he allegedly locked Johnson out of a West Englewood home that Johnson had fully rehabbed at a cost of more than $65,000.
In court filings, Johnson said he had worked on the home for more than a year, and kept receiving extensions on his three-month contract to flip it. However, in November 2009, after the property had passed plumbing, electrical, and heating inspections, Bingham demanded Johnson pay off the balance on the contract — $35,000 — within 30 days, Johnson claimed. When Johnson couldn’t come up with the money, Bingham evicted Johnson in March 2010, court records show.
In court filings, Johnson argued the contract was “unreasonably favorable” to Bingham and that Bingham lulled Johnson “into a false sense of comfort and security.” A Cook County judge dismissed the case.
Johnson’s son, Maurice Tylon, told Injustice Watch that his father died in November. “He would say to me, ‘Son, they didn’t have to do me like that,’” Tylon said.
Also in 2010, two women in their mid-70s sued Bingham claiming he had targeted them with a reverse-mortgage scheme that promised them a “newly rehabbed” home for $300 per month. However, Bingham later pressured them into signing loan documents that would pay out one of his companies and burden the women with six-figure debts, according to the lawsuits.
Bingham’s companies served as both the seller and lender in both of their original reverse-mortgage deals, court records show. One of the women alleged in court filings Bingham “covered the body of the documents” she had to sign “with a folder in his hand, leaving only the signature lines visible.” The woman alleged her signature had been “forged or fraudulently affixed” to a document that gave the property back to Bingham on the same day he began proceedings to kick her out of the property.
In court documents, the other woman claimed that when she asked questions about the documents Bingham told her to sign, he “yelled at her, and exclaimed, ‘Don’t try to be a lawyer.’”
Both women were represented by attorney Michelle A. Weinberg, who until last year was a supervisory attorney at Legal Aid Chicago, with a focus on seniors and consumer protection cases. Weinberg secured undisclosed settlements for both women, but Bingham denied wrongdoing, court records show. In an interview, Weinberg told Injustice Watch she believed Bingham “did not have the intent to do an honest deal for these elderly people.”
Similar allegations against Bingham came in 2017, when a widow in her late 60s sued to force him to honor an agreement to let her stay in her home, court records show.
Bingham had taken over her Cicero bungalow through tax foreclosure, but agreed to let her stay as long as she paid him $700 per month plus taxes and utilities. The agreement also said the woman could buy back her home if she obtained a payout from Cook County’s indemnity fund, a trust that provides financial relief for particularly vulnerable homeowners in tax foreclosure, according to court documents. After a year and a half, the woman received an indemnity award for $79,275. But according to a motion filed by the woman, Bingham refused to honor the deal and instead moved to evict her.
Ultimately, a Cook County judge ruled in her favor and ordered Bingham to honor the agreement and pay her legal fees. Her lawyer, Jeffrey S. Blumenthal, told Injustice Watch in an interview that he never got a clear answer as to why Bingham reneged.
“It was an inexcusable breach,” Blumenthal said.
“He made up excuses, and they were complete, for lack of a better word, bullshit.”
Homeowners fight back
Over the last few years, Illinois’ tax lien industry has been turned upside down by a string of lawsuits — the ramifications of which have hit Bingham directly.
The floodgates opened in May 2023, after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a Minnesota homeowner was entitled to the surplus generated by the sale of her home to satisfy a property tax debt. In effect, the court found it was unconstitutional for the homeowner to lose all of her home equity when it was worth more than what she owed in taxes.
Six months later, tax-foreclosed homeowners in Lake, DuPage, and other collar counties filed a federal lawsuit against their county treasurers and clerks. The homeowners argued the officials facilitated the loss of their equity by selling their tax debt.
In response, the officials argued that Illinois law forced them to sell their tax debt and that the state should be responsible for any remedy. If the court instead found the counties liable — as another federal judge recently ruled in a separate case involving Cook County — then it should be on the tax buyers to make the homeowners whole, they said.
“To the extent that any constitutional deprivation of rights occurred, it is due to the tax buyers’ pursuit and receipt of a tax deed,” the counties argued in their complaint filed against four of the tax buyers last April.
The counties, the complaint reads, “are entitled to contribution from the tax buyers in the full amount of any judgment entered in plaintiffs’ favor.”
One of the tax buyers named in the counties’ complaint was Cortezz LLC, a Bingham-controlled entity that took over and sold one of the plaintiff’s homes, according to court records.
Records obtained by Injustice Watch show Bingham has expanded his business in the collar counties in recent years, purchasing more than $4 million in tax liens since 2023.
However, of the six tax buyers named in the counties’ complaint, only Cortezz LLC has yet to be served or make an appearance in the case, court records show.
In October, a court-appointed special process server attempted to deliver a notice for Cortezz LLC to respond to the lawsuit to the company’s registered agent, eeServices Inc., another Bingham-controlled entity. However, when the process server arrived at its listed address on Chicago’s South Side, the building was vacant, records show.
In November, the process server attempted to serve Cortezz LLC at its listed place of business — the storefront in Northlake in between the old piano store and the dental clinic — on three separate days, records show. Each time, no one answered the door, even when there were “cars in the parking lot,” the server wrote in an affidavit for the court.
Then in December, records show Cortezz LLC filed an updated annual report with the Illinois Secretary of State. The listed managers for the company had changed from Bingham the previous year to “P. Gomez” and “Pimaria Muncipa.”
Injustice Watch could not find contact information for either. The address listed for both in the annual report was a UPS Store in Oak Park.
However, as recently as late January, Bingham signed as the manager of Cortezz LLC on a document transferring ownership of a property in Englewood.
The federal court case involving the homeowners, the collar counties, Cortezz LLC, and the other tax buyers is set for a hearing March 17. U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis is set to rule on the other tax buyers’ motions to dismiss the complaint against them.
Illinois legislators have postponed Cook County’s 2025 tax sale, which had already been rescheduled from last August to later this month, pushing it back until December 2026.
They have also taken up several proposals currently pending before the General Assembly that could further upend the tax foreclosure process. One proposal by Sen. Celina Villanueva (D-Chicago), backed by a coalition of community groups as well as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Treasurer Pappas, would end the sale of tax debt to private buyers in Cook County altogether.
“Private investors are in the business of buying property tax debt to make a profit, often to the detriment of homeowners, communities, and local governments,” Pappas said last month in a statement through a spokesperson.
A lobbyist for the Illinois Tax Purchasers Association, which advocates for tax buyers in Springfield, did not respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, records show Bingham continues to reap profits from homes he purchased through past Cook County tax sales. In January, records show, Bingham sold a single-family home in south suburban Sauk Village for $70,000. Records show he paid less than $30,000 in delinquent taxes and fees to acquire it.
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